Ulm School of Design
The HfG quickly gained international recognition by emphasizing the holistic, multidisciplinary context of design beyond the Bauhaus approach of integrating art, craft and technology.
This resulted in numerous changes in the content, organization of classes and continuing internal conflicts that influenced the final decision of closing the HfG in 1968.
In 1946 Inge Scholl along with Otl Aicher and a group of young intellectuals considered creating a teaching and research institution to foster the humanistic education ideal and link creative activity to everyday life.
The project was funded through the influx of a million marks by John McCloy of the American High Command for Germany in the post-war governing structure.
[4] Distinguished visiting lecturers were invited from a variety of disciplines and included: Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Charles and Ray Eames, Herbert Bayer, Josef Müller-Brockmann, Reyner Banham, Buckminster Fuller, Hugo Häring, Konrad Wachsmann, Norbert Wiener, Ralph Ellison, and Mia Seeger.
In 1956 Max Bill resigned as rector, due to changes in the body of academic development and differences in the approach to design school teaching.
Max Bill favored a teaching approach that followed the continuation of the "heroic" Bauhaus tradition, based on the Arts and Crafts model, in which the artist-designer saw their primary role in product development as form-giving.
However, many teachers at HfG, especially those of theoretical courses, sought to emphasize analytic methods encompassing sociological, economic, psychological and physiological considerations.
Among the most successful was audio equipment for the company Braun, corporate identity for the German airline Lufthansa and elevated trains for Railroad Hamburg.
This approach caused internal conflicts as Otl Aicher, Hans Gugelot, Walter Zeischegg, and Tomás Maldonado resisted such an overly analytical emphasis and claimed instead that the design process had to be more than strictly a 'method of analysis'.
In addition to the fundamental debate over curriculum, changes were made in the constitution and the reintroduction of a single rector to replace the Board of Governors.
After the unsuccessful Parliament demand that HfG join the Ulm School of Engineering, Federal subsidies were abolished and the financial situation became untenable.
The first year was devoted to the basic design course (Vorkurs) that was intended to offset the deficit in primary and secondary education in terms of creative project activity.
The development of new methods of mass production during the Second World War implored the designer to stop focusing primarily on the artistic point of view of the profession.
In the early years of operation, and with the direction of Max Bill, the teaching of the school was guided by the principles of the Bauhaus, where the designer had a profile of being much more artistic than analytic.
Based on the discrepancies between Bill's approach and that of other teachers, including the systems principles of Tomás Maldonado, the school shifted its ideology to a more methodological and structured field of study, but one that also strongly embraced aesthetics as a primary factor.
Because of this, the Braun-HfG collaboration was a formidable test bench for the design of "honest" form and coherent identity as an alternative to the random "styling" of individual objects.
HfG pioneered the integration of science and art, thereby creating a teaching of design based on a structured problem-solving approach: reflections on the problems of use by people, knowledge of materials and production processes, methods of analysis and synthesis, choice and founded projective alternatives, the emphasis on scientific and technical disciplines, the consideration of ergonomics, the integration of aesthetics, the understanding of semiotics and a close academic relationship with industry.
